At the turn of the century, the whole world is jubilant and celebrating.

At the initiative of my second sister, on the day of the Spring Festival at the turn of the century, our family went out to the photo studio to take a family photo. Of course, there are two other meanings to our family portrait, one is that my mother turned 60 in that year, and the other is to celebrate my brother's escape from prison.

This was the most complete family photo of my family, and all the family members at that time were in the picture. My mother sat in the middle, my brother and sister-in-law sat on the left, the eldest sister and my eldest brother-in-law sat on the right, and the children of the two families stood in the back. The second sister and the second brother-in-law, Gao Jiangjiang and I stood in the middle of the back row, and the second brother-in-law and I were holding our own children.

We each had mixed and depressed feelings because my father was missing from the picture. A year before that, my father passed away from liver cancer, so my second sister always blamed herself for not advocating a family photo when my father was alive.

At the time of my father's death, we didn't expect so much sacrifice in the future, except for grief. Until the courtyard of my old house began to be deserted; The courtyard of the long-distance freight station that my brother changed careers to do has never been leveled; Gao Jiangjiang and I were both busy picking up and dropping off our children because of work, and we all realized that it was so ridiculous that we once thought that our father only knew work and had no love for our brothers and sisters.

My father was a relatively silent man, he would never argue with people over trivial matters, and he rarely expressed his thoughts to others. He spent his whole life in labor, even if he became the leader of the unit, he could eat and live in the unit for several days in a row, one person did the work of several people, and occasionally took a break and kept running the work at home.

My father's work ended in the last year of the last century, and I will never forget that day, which was Children's Day, just in time for the weekend, my wife and I took our children to the park. I received a call from my mother saying that my father came back from the unit where he had been rehired after he retired, saying that he had a stomach ache, took some medicine at home, took a day off, and returned to work. Just one day later, he returned. My mother, a merchant who has lived with my father for more than 30 years, knows his temperament very well, and will never take any unbearable illness seriously, so I took him to the hospital, and about a week later, my father's condition was diagnosed with advanced liver cancer.

From then on, my father was at rest, stopped his 61 years of labor, suffered a hundred days of illness, and passed away forever.

When we were convinced that my father's liver cancer was incurable, we realized that my father had not enjoyed much happiness in his life, even though our family was not poor. My father was born in the forties of the last century, and when he was a child, he followed his grandmother to the Northeast and survived by begging for food all the way. Although life was good after liberation, my father was unusually frugal and never willing to be extravagant, and all good things were left to us and my mother.

After my father's illness, we tried our best to buy him food and high-end clothes, but he couldn't enjoy them anymore.

When we think that our father has never enjoyed the love of others, it is too late to beat him on the back and waist, and it will not alleviate the torture of the illness.

When my father walked into another world, I remembered that normal people are afraid when they are dying, and they are very nostalgic for this world, but when we are dying, no one holds his hand and gives others the last trace of warmth and hope in the world. At that time, all of us had to obey Mr. Yin and Yang's command, stay away from my father, and not be pounced on by his last breath.

So we all stood far away and watched my father lie there alone, silently and forever.

In the days that followed, when I played with my son again and again, I would always think of when I was a child, my father specially made us dry food for hedgehogs, snakes and other small animals during the Spring Festival every year, as we asked, as long as he could make it; He would keep the cans and bottles for the Chinese New Year to make a lot of lanterns, enough for us to carry and play.

After we went to school, every year when we handed out new books at the beginning of the school year, my father would take out the newspaper, wrap the books one by one for several nights in the dim light, and write the names on each of them. He didn't read much, he fled to the northeast with his grandmother since he was a child, and learned some culture in night school after liberation, so he was very knowledgeable, which can be seen from his love for our books. Baoshu is when we are close to my father, but he never told us to read well, he rarely nagged, only silently wrapped every wish of his heart in our book cover, hoping that we could read it, however, we only learned the inside of the book, the book cover touched with our hands every day, but never experienced it with our hearts.

When I first entered junior high school, it was the early 80s, the country as a whole was not rich, although my family was in good condition, but occasionally had to eat steamed buns mixed with cornmeal, and my father steamed some extra white flour steamed buns for me to take to eat at school at noon, for fear that I would not be full of coarse grains outside.

When I was in high school, my father once came to his unit across the street from my school and stood upstairs looking for me on our playground, and he happened to see me, and later, he told me more than once: "You kick a ball in the snow, kick that old high!" ”

I didn't feel anything at the time, except that my dad had seen me from the opposite floor and had said it several times.

Later, every time my father went to run errands, he would stand upstairs and look for me on the playground, but I was still indifferent to my father's gaze. Now I deeply understand with a heavy heart what kind of warmth and relief my father felt in his heart the moment he found me, and what a silent father would have when he looked for his son full of expectations. However, I was in love with Kimbe, hostile to all my relatives who opposed me.

When I had a son, and the moment I went to the playground of my son's school and searched for my son's familiar figure, I experienced my father's silent love for me.

Later, when my father was at home on vacation, he looked at the son of the second sister Ming Ming without leaving one step, in order to prevent Ming Ming from throwing things into the water tank, his father put away all the things that the child could hold, and Ming Ming saw that he couldn't find anything and took off his little shoes and threw them into the water tank.

Father always does what you need, when you need it. He never expressed anything, and never asked for anything in return, but always reminded my second sister and my brother that they should give back to the society when they are rich. He silently raised our children one after another, and left us without a word before we had time to enjoy our filial piety, especially without receiving anything in return from me.

My father never asked us a word until he died.

I knew he wanted to live.

Although we are also doing our best to treat him in the best hospitals in the provincial capital and the capital, we are trying to prolong his life and reduce his suffering. He may have understood our dedication, but I know that even if he didn't, he would rather die than say anything.

The Father has been silent all his life, so that we let us unconsciously shut up all his love, and ignore the existence of Father's love like that. Until that time when I drove back to the city from Higashiyama, I listened to the "boiling life", thought about Jinbei, thought about my brother, thought about the people related to them, and then thought of my father, and thought of the debt to my father.

My father, who has paid us a lot of hidden love in his practical and silent actions, has been oblique and ignorant of it.

I find myself sometimes so disregarded by my loved ones.